Is Twitter vs Jaiku a Replay of Friendster vs MySpace

Twitter would do well to study the lessons learned in the history of
Friendster vs MySpace. Building a Twitter clone is not rocket science.
There is no huge barrier to entry. The only thing that keeps twitter on
top of other services is their large user base.

As danah boyd points
out in this
essay
which compares Friendster vs MySpace, People use the social
technologies that all their friends are using. I personally am
hesitant to switch, because everyone I know is on Twitter, not on some
other platform.

However, too many days of showing users this damn
cat
(yes, I’m a dog person) instead of their friends and it won’t be long
before they leave in droves.

Atwood is
convinced
that Twitter needs to switch to a platform other than Rails. As danah
points out in the essay, it is not about technological perfection.
Sticking to Rails because of the beauty of the code doesn’t matter to
the masses. Especially when the service is always down.

I am more ambivalent on the question of whether they should leave Rails
since I don’t fully understand if Rails is the bottleneck.

My experience with is that most scaling problems are the result of
poorly written code, not the platform. More specifically, data access
code is where I would look first. Simple mistakes like making a database
call per item when loading a collection of hundreds or thousands of
items can kill the scaling of a site. We recently fixed a bug like that
in Subtext when
displaying hundreds of comments. It can happen to anyone.

Twitter’s CEO blogged about yesterday’s outages in a post entitled, The
Devil’s in the
Details.
Indeed. In any case, I’ll stick with Twitter a little while longer. But
if they don’t do something soon, I’ll see you on
Jaiku.